


Masquerade

by Sylv



Category: Teen Titans (Animated Series)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-03
Updated: 2012-12-03
Packaged: 2017-11-20 04:58:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/581537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sylv/pseuds/Sylv
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No matter how well they knew each other, they couldn't really see each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Masquerade

Nothing was ever fair, it seemed.

He knew that fair was an illusion, from experience. But why him? Why  _them_?

There was no time for an answer, for a jaggedly cut knife whizzed past his ear, as he had barely had time to duck around it, and then avoid the long black hair that whipped around to meet him, pulled down with weights. The knife was surely poisoned, and the weights were undoubtedly heavy enough to kill him if she hit him at the right angle. She wasn't some petty criminal who robbed banks and held people hostage. She was an assassin, and she killed them—quietly, consistently, easily. It was what she did best.

He notched an arrow in his bow, but he knew that it was too late—too late, too late, too late, he chanted in his head, berating himself for allowing his mind to wander in the middle of a battle with such a dangerous opponent.  _Stupid_ , he hissed, bringing around his bow to face her futilely,  _stupid._

When she stood, she didn't jut out a hip, or place her hands on her waist. She wasn't like any other girls he knew; she stood straight and tall, arms hanging down by her sides loosely, fists clenching and unclenching in preparation for something that wasn't going to come. Her feet were shoulder-width apart, and braced to withstand an impact or push her forwards in the blink of an eye. And on her face, a smile. She was always smiling at him.

She was always smiling at everyone.

"Did you get me?" He asked, narrowing his eyes behind his mask and holding his bow steady, so that if he let the arrow go it would, at this short distance, penetrate completely through her skull. She looked pointedly down at his feet, and then up above his head without saying a word. Being just as silent, he glanced down and saw to his dismay, although not his surprise, that the slim breathing space in the fabric of his shoes were pinned to the ground with daggers so deeply that he could not have moved another inch.

Wondering what trap she could have set for him in the trees, he glanced up, only to see her move out of the corner of his eyes. Even before his green eyes had time to widen, she was up against him, behind the bow that he was so studiously holding up, and pressing a straight-bladed, red dagger up against his neck. He would have been able to feel her breath on his skin, had she not been wearing a mask.

"Feeling lazy today?" He cheekily wondered, attempting to crane his head downwards without moving his neck so that the red dagger—

_Red like blood, red his costume, red like the color of the flowers that he—_

That train of thought was stopped before it could go any further. That wasn't anything that he was meant to be thinking about, even when he wasn't in a particularly life-threatening situation with a girl whose tactics could always catch him off guard absolutely ready to kill him. She nicked his skin with the edge, and he felt the smooth metal of the blade cutting through the delicate layers of skin, straying dangerously close to his jugular. He tried not to swallow, but the thought that he  _mustn't_  made him need to even more.

With a sharp gesture, the masked girl managed to somehow point out that she wanted his belt. He knew this; he always knew this, they had been through this routine many times before. Although sometimes it was switched, and he was the one demanding her knives or her poisons, or anything else that he could get from her. With a strangled sigh, he awkwardly maneuvered his hands to reach his belt and unclipped it, allowing it to fall to the ground.

At the same moment that she could be sure he was going to follow her orders, she slipped out from in between his arms, taking the belt with her on one of her legs and flipping away. Her long metallic claws scraped down his chest as she went, and he could swear that he heard her say something, but then the long, silky black hair was spinning his way, and he heard rather than saw the clanking weights before they made contact with his skull. He dropped to the forest floor without another sound, his eyes rolling back in his head.

It was her chance. She stood there, fingering the belt that she had been after the entire time, which held much more information that she could have hoped to gain from anyone else. No one else would have hesitated to shoot her. Although she supposed that their morals would prevent them from killing someone; silly of them, she reflected, moving closer to him. She wouldn't have paused had the need for him to die arisen. She stooped over closer to his face and the growing bruise of many colors on the side of his head, with blood already beginning to clot around the wound.

It was her chance.

_They never removed the masks. Shirts were ripped and weapons broken, and sometimes they had nothing else on because they had been fighting for so long; so long that their intelligence and cunning had stripped them of everything but the masks. It was in no way sexual, but it was intimate. And yet, they never made any move to rid themselves or each other of the masks. It was something, some unspoken agreement between them._

' _Can you see me now?'_

_He forever had white eyes, and she?_

_She was always smiling._

She turned away. He wouldn't die; she had made sure of it when she hit him. There was no prickle of worry in her stomach, and nothing was beginning to sting at the corners of her eyes. There  _wasn't_. She toyed with the belt that was in her hands and felt the grooves of where his own fingers moved over it, where he drew his weapons and his gadgets and the information that she would use to hack into the justice system and screw with things a bit.

Just for fun.

And maybe she would leave him those clues again. Those ones that he would only know. Highlight every third and twenty-seventh word because those are the days of his birthday and string them together in a sentence. Then, find the sixth and eighteenth words in the scrambled paragraphs because those were the days of her birthday. Read them. Figure out the code. What's her favorite country that they've both been to? Hint: they spent a week there during the summer…

She smiled to herself. A small one. A dangerous one. A bittersweet one. He would crack it, although who knew in how much time? And she would make it much, much more complicated than that simple piece. But it wouldn't matter; not really.

Because no matter how well they knew each other, they couldn't see each other.


End file.
